Dorothy E. Smith

Dzieła

• 1987The Everyday World as Problematic (Codzienny świat jako problematyka)

  Feministyczna socjologia, która wychodzi od codziennego doświadczenia kobiet i śledzi, jak teksty i instytucje organizują je z zewnątrz.

Stanowisko

Smith began from what she called the bifurcation of consciousness. As a sociologist she was trained to think in the abstract categories of a discipline made by men and for the institutions they ran; as a mother she lived in a world of bodies, children and particular tasks that those categories could not see. In “Women’s Perspective as a Radical Critique of Sociology” (1974) and The Everyday World as Problematic (1987) she argued that sociology should begin not from theory but from the standpoint of people in their actual everyday lives, and treat that world as a problem to be explained. What explains it are the “relations of ruling”: the organisation of modern society through texts – forms, files, statistics, laws and professional knowledge – which coordinate what people do in many places at once. From this came institutional ethnography, a method of tracing how such texts organise, for instance, a mother’s work around her child’s schooling or a patient’s passage through a hospital. Smith is counted among the founders of feminist standpoint theory, though she insisted that a standpoint is a place to begin inquiry, not a privileged access to truth.

Życie i kontekst

Dorothy Edith Smith was born in 1926 in Northallerton in Yorkshire. She worked as a secretary in publishing before studying at the London School of Economics, where she graduated in sociology in 1955. She went to the University of California, Berkeley, with her husband and took her doctorate there in 1963. After the marriage ended she raised two young sons alone while teaching – and the split between her life as a mother and her life as an academic became the starting point of her thought. In 1968 she moved to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where she helped to establish women’s studies, and in 1977 to the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in Toronto. She kept publishing until the year of her death and died in Vancouver in 2022, aged 95.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• “Women’s Perspective as a Radical Critique of Sociology” (1974)
• The Conceptual Practices of Power (1990)
• Texts, Facts, and Femininity (1990)
• Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People (2005)

Pojawia się w

• Debata „Komu się wierzy? Niesprawiedliwość epistemiczna”